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Comment by brown9-2 | Hacker News Reader

I think the comparison here to Enron is a bit of a stretch.

From what I know of Google, their internal staffing of projects is done much the same way: you're assigned to certain teams when you first join the company, but after that the various Product Owners try to recruit and advertise within the company for engineers to join their team.

When I was interviewing there I recall seeing flyers posted in common areas advertising different projects that were in need of engineers to come join them ("Interested in _____? Google ___ could use your help!").

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"I think the comparison here to Enron is a bit of a stretch."

Could you clarify why this is? I'm not trying to imply anything, certainly not that Facebook is Enron, just that (to me) they have similar attitudes to assigning staff to work duties. When I read the Facebook quote, I immediately thought of Skilling's quote.

It seems to me and many others here on HN that I've read over the last few months have problems with the way Facebook operate e.g. those who need to use their API to integrate with their own service, privacy concerns, spam, etc; and Facebook doesn't seem to address these issues at all. That was my ultimate point - how they address with these issues, and could the fact they are not dealt with in a timely manner actually be a symptom of letting engineers pick their own work?

> Could you clarify why this is? I'm not trying to imply anything, certainly not that Facebook is Enron, just that (to me) they have similar attitudes to assigning staff to work duties. When I read the Facebook quote, I immediately thought of Skilling's quote.

Let's see how I can put this. What you've just done is the business equivalent of Godwin's law. It would be like comparing US customs to the Nazis because, you know, both want to look at your papers.

What makes Enron Enron isn't how they did staffing, it's how they cooked their books and defrauded people. Their name is synonymous with fraud and corruption, and so invoking them in conversation about similar staffing practices seems... misleading.

Cooking the books was the end result of an over-arching corporate culture. Part of which started with how they did staffing.

If facebook is starting to go down this same road they might arrive at the same end.

Doesn't seem like he's calling Facebook a fraud. But Enron had a famously superstar-driven culture. In particular, they had a fairly strict employee ranking system. Every year, each employee would be assigned a quintile based on performance. The top 20% of performers would always get raises, and the bottom 20% would always get fired. Sounds like a great system in theory, but from what I hear from people who were there, it led to a poisonous and cutthroat culture. Not sure if the same will happen to Facebook, but there certainly are some dangers.

The problem with that is the relative performance. If you have no shot at being top 20% all you need to do to survive is pick one of four peers and "outperform" him or her. No wonder cutting throats occurred...

Well, sort of. Most projects at Google have headcount budgets that they can't go over without management approval. But even if you have the headcount, you still need to find people.

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